Leia stood in the middle of the Pont des Arts spanning the Seine, clutching the encrypted phone that should have been destroyed. The wind ruffled her hair, yet she felt no cold—only a numb sense of disorientation and dread.
After being expelled last night, she hadn’t left Paris. Instead, she’d gone to the former site of the Sainte-Anne Sanatorium in Lucerne—now converted into luxury apartments. She tracked down the former administrator, a retired nurse, and traded a thousand euros for a fragment of the past.
“Those children,” the nurse mumbled, sipping cheap brandy, her gaze drifting into the distance, “they called them ‘special talents’. But to me, they were just scared kids. That man with the scar on his face—we called him ‘the Sculptor’—would take the children into a soundproof room a
